Public utility enterprises for electric supply, gas supply, communication service, etc. and the waterworks/sewerage management divisions, public works divisions, etc. of local governments need maps and facility drawings for performing the maintenance and management of their facilities. Up to date, such enterprises and local governments have proceeded with data reduction or consolidation through the digitalization of maps and facility drawings.
On the other hand, the progress of network-related technologies represented by optical communication networks, ATM and so on is bringing forth the recent situation in which the communication of a large volume of data on the Internet environment is enabled. Therein, the handling of map information requiring a large capacity is now realizable.
In such circumstances, it is desired that maps and facility drawings managed by individual organizations are communized through the Internet to improve the efficiency by substituting the on-line communication of data for the off-line data data communication which has hitherto been made. Namely, each enterprise or organization manages its facility drawings but is not concerned in the management of facility drawings which are to be managed by another enterprise or organization. Therefore, what is to be done by each enterprise or local government when an actual construction work is to be executed, includes collecting the drawings of individual facilities installed at a location to be subjected to construction work and making the registration or superimposition of the facility drawings to grasp the arrangement of facilities.
This registration of facility drawings requires a user not only to simply unify the coordinate systems and units of facility drawings provided from respective enterprises and local government but also to select user's desired objects or targets from among these drawings with different contents of description so that the selected objects are displayed in a super-imposed manner. Normally, map information on facility drawings or the like includes an assembly of plural objects classified for the respective types of subjects. Also, different names/definitions are respectively employed by the organizations or enterprises possessing the facility drawings. Accordingly, the above-mentioned selection of user's desired objects is not easy.
Up to date, the activities for standardization by ISO/TC112, Open GIS and so on have exhibited, for example, the notation of the location and outline of map information by meta data, and the prescription of a common interface between different types of GIS's by a distributed object technology.
For actual realization of the mutual utilization of map information, however, it is necessary to make, with respect to the respective objects included in map information provided from different organizations, the determination of how are they associated with an object architecture used in an organization to which the user belongs, as mentioned above. In connection with this, the existing conditions are such that the association of objects with each other (or the generation of a relationship) is made relying upon a manual work by the user.